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What Was Lost

Author: Catherine O'flynn
Publisher: Tindal Street Press
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

68 reviews
Sales Rank: 688

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.9

ISBN: 0955138418
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780955138416
ASIN: 0955138418

Publication Date: January 4, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: IN STOCK - BRAND NEW - SENT FIRST CLASS - IMMEDIATE DISPATCH

Also Available In:

•	Paperback - What Was Lost
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Customer Reviews: Read 63 more reviews...

1 out of 5 stars

Booker List? You Gotta Be Kidding August 7, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful

I see all the excellent novels passed over on both the long and short lists for the Booker, then along comes a derivative, self-important book like this and I admit I feel a bit aggrieved. A 10-year-old who starts a detective agency with a stuffed monkey but is her school's second smartest student? The character of Kate is so badly constructed that she's totally unbelievable. Her age level seems to vary between 4 and 40. As for the rest of the book, come on, some people actually like to shop, and work, at the mall. It's not Sartre's no exit, it's a shopping center. I'm so bored with immature writers scribbling as if any place that gives people the opportunity to buy things in multiple shops rather than the over-priced high street with its dusty goods (and in this book) spoiled meats is the 21st century version of hell. I skimmed the last 50% of this book, not being able to another entire page of the daily life of mall employees.

5 out of 5 stars

A wonderful story July 30, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

A delightfully complete read with an intriguing new angle on shopping evolution. Immediately you feel at home in Kate's company and enjoy her innocent way of looking at the world around her - it is such a funny book as well as being a mystery, a psychological thriller and a romantic story.
The idea of a shopping centre having something in common with vast old cathedrals and medieval buildings is a thoughtful touch. The thoughts that pass through the minds of the shoppers and other occupants of the building are utterly realistic.
The characters are all right on target, their regrets, fears and inhibitions all too understandable.
I loved it, read it in a day and hurried to lend it on. A fresh and friendly read with good human stories that linger in the mind afterwards. Everything falls into place.....

4 out of 5 stars

what was a great book July 23, 2008
The first part of this book is absolutely brilliant, because we're following in the footsteps of would-be detective Kate Meaney and her sidekick stuffed monkey and both are charming, quirky, funny heroes and we really care about what happens to them. Then we jump forward 20 years, to the shopping mall which is the gloomy, ghostly, cavernous entity at the centre of the book. Bereaved security guard, Kurt, sees a small girl on the camera late at night, and he and his tentative new friend Lisa, set out to find the truth about the child. I actually liked both Kurt and Lisa, I thought they were rounded characters, but the book does drag in the middle. The suspense we feel the first time Kurt sees Kate on the camera just isn't sustained and there's no particular reason for the ghost to be there. The mystery of Kate's disappearance is solved, but nothing really changes.

There are also rather a lot of coincidences and people forget really important things and then remember them when its convenient to the plot.

I really, really enjoyed reading this book, but when I reached the end and thought about it, I felt a little let down. It's not a five-star read, but I would have given it four-and-a-half if I could!

3 out of 5 stars

Average July 21, 2008
The premise of the book is an original one, starting with a young girl and a shopping mall. The book starts strongly but you are let down in the middle and I felt the book did not pick up again until right at the end of the story when all is revealed.

I felt the characters were a bit flimsy and it was not a book that I really, really wanted to read or one of those books that you can't put down. The book is easy to read and because the story and plot are very different to the majority of books I would recommend borrowing it from someone you know or a library but I am unsure if it is worth purachasing.

2 out of 5 stars

"It was going to be a truly hellish day at Your Music" July 13, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful

Hmmm. This would smell of "first novel" to me even if this wasn't advertised all over the front cover. How can I tell? you ask wide eyed. Perhaps it's the heavy reliance on personal experience (the sweet shop, the early eighties primary school, the shopping centre), perhaps it's the switch from one writing style to another to showcase that the author has Technique, perhaps it's the heavy editing which always, always shows, just like the alterations on a cheap suit, perhaps it's the use of the ghost story, a standard support for flimsy plots and a favourite of the aspiring scribbler, because so many of us got hooked on reading through that particular genre.

Having said all that, it's a decent enough, if wildly overpraised first attempt. A lonely young girl, whose diaries we read at the beginning of the book, fantasises about being a private eye and spends time at the recently constructed local shopping centre pretending to solve crime. One day, she disappears. Twenty years later, her disappearance is still unsolved, but her image appears on the CCTV of the same shopping centre, pulling a security guard and a shop assistant into reinvestigating what really happened years ago. There are a couple of fairly predictable plot twists and that's about it.

Thematically, O'Flynn is going for a critique of consumer culture, the point so brilliantly captured by the zombies staggering around the mall in Romero's "Dawn of the Dead". Shopping makes ghosts of us all. The trouble is that the fate of the girl and the journey of the characters has no relationship to that theme, so the exercise becomes as empty as the night time corridors of the Green Oaks Centre and left me with the unsatisfied feeling a whole day shopping for things I don't really need gives me.